passages, part i
sala
sunday mornings in my dasmarinas life go something like this: i use my weekend rights to wake at 8 but get out of bed at 845a; visit the CR; stroll through the sala to the front porch where C and i have breakfast with Tita E. our breakfasts combine all the comfort foods my mom served only rarely and in separate sittings. this morning, for example, i gorged on garlic fried rice, lechon kawali, hot pan de sal and cheese wiz, and suman. as we eat, trikes rush by on our relatively busy street, leaving behind trails of exhaust and the gurgles of motors. Tita’s meal is usually interrupted a couple times by folks who swing by her corner store for something (a bag of cold water, a packet of crackers, a cigarette).
all the while, Tita blasts 102.7 Kiss FM, an aural privilege reserved especially for sundays. the station uses the same tag as the station in LA circa 1997, but instead of Rick Dees we have a less abrasive, Filipino-speaking DJ. and instead of pop hits from the 90s, the station plays ballads from the 1950s and 1960s.
lazy sunday morning saturation: the air is heavy with heat, moisture, exhaust, paul anka, weepy strings and dramatic musical climaxes; my stomach is weighted by lechon and grains. more ballads – elvis this time? – accompany the trek back through the darkened sala, back to my room.
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one of my classmates here is puerto rican, and we often trade stories on motherlands, inflected by the lens of our experience now. she marvelled once at the lingual-colonial similarity, something like: “english is like a layer of garbage here, just like in puerto rico. it exists, but it’s in lower, vulgarized forms, left behind by US colonization.”
what i visualized when she said this were Coca-Cola images on handmade signs for corner stores that are more numerous than a 1:corner ratio, Rabsico wrappers that litter streets and waterways, and characters in teleseryas whose Tagalog is interrupted by English phrases used to heighten the drama.
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my mind is still reeling from conversations with P, R, and A yesterday, part of the herculean and hubristic project i’ve taken on of sketching out communities of writers in cavite, the province where i’m staying this first month. (so far P, R, and A have offered me beautiful things: cavitenos and their writers are matapang, they are travelers and migrants, they are in a complex and dynamic relationship to metro maynila, which sits northeast of cavite and encroaches on the province through its cultural hegemony and exurban sprawl).
P, former editor of the literary folio at DLSU-D, shared stories of the enemies he’s made around campus because of his provocative columns. at one point he spoke with humor and scorn about one of his targets, a student group that exists specifically to further the practice of speaking English among its members.
he said, in tagalog, that the members of this group were of course the more wealthy students on campus. i laughed when he mimicked their english, the kind spoken by valley girls and teenagers in the US, at least in P’s demonstration: “like, you know.” (and in the back of my mind i thought, oh god this is how i talk). after his first stories about the difficulties of convincing the school of the importance of student publications, especially at a school whose funds are funneled to the business school (perhaps the same students of the english group), and after a few hours of hearing stories and thoughtful takes on cavite literature in tagalog (our chats could only be in tagalog, even my broken tagalog), i felt myself laughing with the same scorn and shaking my head with the same disdain.
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low rider
for short distances within town we’ll sometimes take trikes, these motorbikes with covered sidecars. as a passenger in one of these, you sit low to the ground with the driver a few inches away to your left. there is no door to your right, so the street opens up to you with alternatingly terrifying and exciting immediacy. passengers in other trikes and sidewalk wares can be at an arm’s length away, and so can jeepneys and gargantuan buses (i can almost touch the tops of their wheels from my seat). i quickly learned to put my trust in the trike drivers even when they insist on inching into brisk traffic, because they maneuver so adeptly between buses and pedestrians, and because i just need to in order to get from one place to another, sanity in tact.
not my language
in tagalog there are no tenses, passive/active voices, or stable subjects. instead there are aspects, actors, beneficiaries, social-reciprocals. this language gets more foreign to me as i learn it.
somewhere during the process of plotting thoughts to words, you need to decide the part of the sentence on which your verb should focus, and attach the appropriate prefix and/or suffix. the actor? the object? the location? the beneficiary, instrument used, or the doer who is forced to do something? the person doing the forcing? victims of calamity, the experiencer of an emotion? that is, tagalog verbs are trained on directionality. where is this act coming from, why, and who is being affected? just a few letters before and after can mean the difference between cooking and being cooked.
the effect is that for a brief moment, or for me a few pained seconds, you consider the relation of actors to objects to place. there’s an affix, magpa-, to express an act being done for someone by someone else; makipag- indicates that you’re joining an ongoing activity with a specific set of actors; ma- signals the experience of a calamity or emotion; maki- denotes the sharing of resources; paki- a sign of respect.
i’d like to think this means a heightened awareness of power relations and social dynamics, embedded at the level of language and in dynamic relation to one’s experience of and in society. and even more, i’d like to think that tagalog forces the speaker to think about what makes it possible to be served, or what actions must always be done together, reciprocally.
lend me your ear, move that mouth
early this summer i met an uncle of mine for the first time. he stopped in LA on the way back to chicago from the philippines. this very learned, rather mayabang uncle said at one point, ‘my kids regret not learning tagalog when they were little. and they should. language is culture.’
—
it’s frustrating to come across folks who can’t pronounce ‘ethnic’ names (like my own), because from one angle it appears that the mispronunciations are almost purposeful or done out of spite. surely, people must hear that their iterations of my name place the accent in the wrong place, or that the ‘A’ is short and not long, or — at the very least — that the last two syllables aren’t to be run into each other in an ugly car weck.
before this scorn reaches its peak, though, it’s reined in by an understanding that perhaps people don’t hear it, or maybe their mouths just don’t move that way. it’s the same understanding i have for people who can’t reproduce musical pitches, even along with the pitch as it plays. it’s the same slack i cut myself for not being able to move my body parts the way i’d like when i ‘dance.’
[still, for the sake of life-long learning, one would hope that with enough practice and attentiveness, pitches can be reached, body-parts can gain flexibility and rhythm, mouths and tongues can do the necessary gymnastics.]
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in tagalog class and when i practice with my parents (who provide rather explicit, ungentle criticism), i’m surprised by my inability to move my mouth and reproduce sounds that i very clearly hear. i can reproduce musical pitches, so why shouldn’t i be able to make those glottal stops? the rhythm of speech isn’t there either; instead the sound is an ugly stop-and-go, in part from a frantic search for words but also from an uncertainty of where to put those filler particles that would make the words move more like a steady stream than a bout of sideways rain. that the language isn’t completely foreign to me, and that i can acknowledge where my speech doesn’t sound right, makes this state a little more pathetic. the block, i suppose, is also psychological.
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i know, i know. kailangan ko magsanay. i need to practice.
us and not u
in tagalog there’s a difference between the pronouns tayo and kami: naglalakad tayo versus naglalakad kami. in english those sentences read identically: we are walking. tayo, though, is the inclusive we — i, him, her, you, we’re all walking; kami is exlusive — we are walking, but you [sneer], i’m sorry to say, are not. okay, that last part is embellished. it’s what i imagine a catty pinay would say, or an extra mean kuya.
i just wonder what spurred the creation of this separate pronoun, that we would need to build in exclusivity, or think twice about collectivity.